Coalition to boost club links as students shun sport on leaving school

With the Olympics just 199 days away, the Government has abandoned a central
legacy promise to increase sports participation in favour of a new focus on
encouraging young people to remain involved in sport.

Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and SportPhoto: EDDIE MULHOLLAND

The previous government pledged to encourage one million more people into sport, but amid evidence the target was doomed, with participation actually falling in some sports, the Coalition has changed tack.

Instead of the target-driven approach, the new focus is on building links between schools and local sports clubs in an attempt to arrest an alarming drop in participation once children leave school.

Currently only 51 per cent of children remain active in sport after the age of 16, and the Government hopes the new policy will drastically improve that figure, with the intention of encouraging “sport for life”.

Under the policy, all 4,000 secondary schools will host “community clubs” intended to foster closer links between schools and local clubs. The links should help children to remain engaged once they leave school.

Establishing the network of clubs will be a key requirement of national governing bodies, who will share around £450 million in funding to boost participation from 2013-2017, 60 per cent of which will be devoted to the school-club links.

The Football Association has pledged that 2,000 clubs will be linked to secondary schools by 2017, rugby union has a target of 1,300 clubs, cricket 1,250 clubs, and rugby league and tennis 1,000 clubs each.

Schools will also receive funding to throw open facilities to the wider public in their communities.

The change of policy has taken 18 months to devise and follows huge cuts to education funding for school sports, but Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt defended the timing and substance of the new policy.

“The one-million target was not going to be delivered whichever government was in power, so we have acknowledged that a top-down, target-driven approach was not going to work,” he said. “If we don’t deliver significant increases in the number of people in sport at 16, 18 and 24 then this policy will have failed, but the existing target was not going to be delivered.

“Even when Labour was ring-fencing money for school sport the funding was in decline, so we should not pretend that everything was rosy.”

Sport England will be responsible for delivering the new policy despite failing to hit previous targets. Governing bodies will face financial penalties if they fail to deliver improvements in performance.